Personal History of My New Year Resolutions

Congratulations, you’ve made it to the end of another year! And an even bigger congratulations to me, for ending this year and starting the next as a runner, once again! Considering that my last post was a triumphant declaration of my return to full shin health, you were probably counting on this one explaining that I was hurt once again, and planning on celebrating the new year by sitting in my closet and crying about how miserable my running life is (which wouldn’t be as bad as it sounds, my closet is pretty big). The past two years have been a cycle of my leg almost feeling better, but then actually still being injured. Not this time. I have officially been back to my ambitious, yet inconsistent, running self for a solid three months!

This is me, doing a real track workout! Definitely not a staged one to trick you into thinking I was running again.

This means that I can now go back to my regularly scheduled programming of setting ridiculously unachievable New Year’s resolutions that revolve around running, as I have done many times in the past. In case you don’t remember, let me refresh your memory of my past running-related NY resolutions:

2009: Run a half marathon. I didn’t blog about this one, but I did do it! This was the end of my reasonable resolutions for a while.

2010: Run 25 miles per week. This would have equaled about 1300 miles, and I ran 536. Specifically, I kept my resolution through May, and my runs for the remainder of the year in entirety included: the Timberline Marathon, the Mt. Hood Scramble, Hood to Coast, and the Portland Marathon. The rest of the year (and for several of those races) I was debilitatingly injured. Or however else you want to describe having moderate IT band tightness.

2011: Run 5 times per week. I didn’t really do this, or try to keep track after about a month.

2012: Run 30 miles per week. All I have to say about that is LOLOLOL (if that was a thing you could reasonably say out loud). Also, this is the year I hurt my shin super bad and began my two-year hiatus from running.

2013: Exercise 3 hours per week. I had finally figured out that setting mileage goals just got myself hurt, but this was a boring resolution that I don’t think I ever kept track of at all. I definitely didn’t do it, at least not until August by which point I had completely forgotten about it.

And then 2014 came around, and I had finally realized that workout related resolutions don’t always go that well for me – or I’m just bad at setting realistic ones, so I changed it up a little bit.

2014: No more cell phone games. Not at all exercise/running related, but I recognized my cell phone game playing ways to be interfering with basically everything in my life that I actually cared about. Things like school, work, working out, going to bed at a reasonable hour, looking at people in the eye while spending time with them, not killing my phone battery for when I needed it later for my important business-woman phone calls, gluing little pieces of paper together and calling it an art project, etc. Assuming I make it the rest of the day without playing a cell phone game, this is the first resolution I have actually remembered and accomplished (other than the half-marathon in 2009, which was different because it was just a one-time thing), meaning that I am officially part of the eight percent of people who keep their NY resolutions! It’s embarrassing how much giving up cell phone games helped me be better at life in general, but as someone who used to fail to complete homework assignments because she spent all her time playing snake on her TI-86 instead, I’m mostly just happy to finally have broken this habit, and will continue to not play games on my cell phone.

And that brings us to 2015. Despite my 2014 success, I’m going to try something slightly different this year. I recently read an article on the internet about how I’m doing everything wrong (this is what basically every article on the internet is about right now); specifically in that it’s better to set 12 resolutions that you work on for a month each. This sounds more fun, and I have a lot of things I’d like to do, so I’m going this route. I’ve also realized that it’s better to make resolutions that remove obstacles in my life that keep me from working out, rather than just saying that I’m going to workout more. I’ve made 12 tentative resolutions, but I’ll just start now with my January resolution so I can change my mind on the other ones later if I want:

January 2015 Resolution: Get out of bed by 6:15 AM every day

Hopefully this is less impossible than it sounds. The motivation here is that I have a job now, and I like to get to work on time. What I don’t like to do, is get out of bed. Ever. Waking up is not hard, but getting out of bed is basically impossible. Usually if I finally do get out of bed, staying out of bed becomes impossible. I regularly get up on time or even a few minutes early to either go to the bathroom, or to walk across the room and turn off the alarm (yeah, I try using that trick), and then promptly jump back into bed. Not to sleep, just to be cozy and in a horizontal position. Then I only get out of bed in time to not be obscenely late to work, rush around getting ready, often forget/don’t have time to pack my workout bag, sit in traffic for way too long, and feel discombobulated all day. When I get up on time, none of that happens and my life is perfect.

After deciding this methodology for my 2015 resolution plan, I read another article that says habits take 66 days to form. Which makes me think I should do six resolutions for two months each, but that doesn’t sound as fun. Screw that article. There are way too many articles on the internet. The internet’s resolution this year should be to stop having so many articles.

I hope you made an equally awesome New Year resolution, or 12 month-long resolutions for 2015. Based on an informal poll I’ve taken in the last month, I’m pretty much the only one in the world that enjoys making New Year’s resolutions, so I’ll assume you’re not making one. But if you are, good luck and Happy New Year!

Miles run in 2014: (at least) 137